Understanding Boosting

By boosting a user could receive up to 2.5x PLY rewards.

Each gauge has a baseAPR and a maxAPR. The baseAPR is what a liquidity provider will earn for providing liquidity to a pool and staking LP tokens in the gauge. The maxAPR can be reached by boosting.

All gauges have different boosting requirements, meaning some pools are easier to boost than others. It depends on how much others have locked and how much the liquidity gauge has.

If no users vote lock any PLY (or simply don’t have any), the inflation will simply be distributed proportionally to the liquidity each one of them provided. However, if a user locks enough PLY in a lock, they are able to boost their PLY rewards by up to factor of 2.5 (reducing it slightly for all users who are not doing that).

Implementation details are such that a user gets the boost at the time of the last action or checkpoint. Since the voting power decreases with time, it is favorable for users to apply a boost and do no further actions until they vote lock more PLY. However, once the vote lock expires, everyone can “kick” the user by creating a checkpoint for that user and, essentially, resetting the user to no boost if they have no voting power at that point already.